The Lives of Barrytown, Part 2: A Bifurcated Community
by Cynthia Owen Philip

The boost the Hudson River Railroad gave to the hamlets along the waterfront was quite simply wondrous. Because it followed the river — the famous water level route — and was easily interactive with all forms of river craft, those settlements gained virtually total control over shipping to the metropolis of New York, where the fast growing population was increasingly dependent on distant rural areas for food and fuel. Unlike the barges, steamboats and sloops, which it would never entirely displace, the railroad ran all winter. Freight business boomed, attracting ancillary trades such as blacksmiths, coopers, teamsters, hotel keepers, and grocers as well as the myriad workers needed to keep the railroad running. It is hard to imagine a more productive sendoff for the second half of the 19th century.

In Barrytown, although most of the land was owned by Robert Donaldson, whose Edgewater occupied the southern half of the hamlet and by John Aspinwall, whose Massena covered the northern half, the working class had recently been released from the quasi-feudal tenantry laws that had prevented them from buying land. A new sense of possibility and independence stimulated growth and prosperity. In fact, so much agricultural produce destined for the city arrived at the depot and docks — hogs, hay and apples as well as dairy products and chickens — that much of it had to await shipment in the new storage houses. In addition, coal shipped from Pennsylvania was brought via the Delaware and Hudson Canal for distribution throughout the area to run steam mills and heat houses as well as to fuel the locomotives. The barge Mayflower, for instance, left Barrytown on Friday nights and New York on Wednesday nights. It advertised paying the highest prices for hay, straw, grain and all other produce and selling, at prices as low as any competitor's, clover and timothy seed, cattle salt, lump or ground plaster (that day's fertilizer) and hay hoops to farmers, as well as choice brands of flour and pickled fish in barrels to their wives.

Donaldson, true to the entrepreneurial spirit that had made his fortune, participated in the new times enthusiastically, for as he himself said, he had bought the land for speculation. He soon advertised "villa sites, different sizes upon elevated land, with views of the river and the mountains, and fields sub-drained and fertilized" as well as "building lots upon the new and old roads leading to the Barrytown wharves, map available." Mr. Augustus Martin, an old-time resident, built a house called Woodlandside up against the ravine that separated Edgewater from Massena. It was "surrounded by elegantly sloping grounds with fine views of the river." Donaldson placed two octagonal gate houses on either side of the road to his house and dock, Station Hill Road. Designed by his friend A. J. Davis, the one on the south side was occupied by a station agent named James Green; it remains a residence today, with only minor alterations. The other was bought by one Peter Flynn, who much enlarged it, and according to a historian who frequented the hamlet at the time, quite spoiled its quaintness. It, too, is a still a residence. To stimulate commerce, Donaldson financed a paper and a grist mill, both driven by coal-fired steam, on his dock area. Later, a hotel and an icehouse would be added.

As he had been civic-minded in North Carolina, so Donaldson remained in Barrytown. In 1855 he built the Sylvania Chapel for his own family's Presbyterian worship and those of the same faith in the hamlet. And when it became obvious that the hamlet needed its own school — the children had been trudging over a mile to the Cedar Hill (now Annandale) school — it was he who donated the land where Dock and Station Hill roads converge and the timbers with which it was built. Both the Presbyterian chapel and the schoolhouse were also designed by A.J. Davis. (Both exist today, converted into dwellings.)

John Aspinwall was far less of a developer than Donaldson. Yet he managed to lure the depot and post office to his end of the waterfront and, in the early days, more houses were built on the road that ran along his property than along the newer road across the ravine to Donaldson's. He sold the property with the docks to Captain P. L. Tyler, who developed them with storehouses, and still another hotel and icehouse. However, Aspinwall's bent was more ecclesiastical than entrepreneurial. He was a major contributor to the Chapel of the Holy Innocents, the enchanting gothic house of worship at St. Stephens Episcopal Seminary established by John Bard on his property at Cedar Hill, whose devoted treasurer Aspinwall would be until the day he died. (The chapel is still well used by Bard College, as St. Stephens is now called, although rarely for religious services.) The Aspinwalls were also fond of entertaining their New York friends. When Theodore Roosevelt was a boy, for instance, he began watching and recording the habits of birds at Massena. It became an interest that led to a near obsession with all wildlife and, when he became president, to the establishing of the national park system.

In 1869, Donaldson's icehouse was struck by lightning. Filled with the sawdust used for insulation, it caught fire. All the buildings on the dock except the grist mill burned down. However, the dock was quickly built up again, this time in brick. The very next year, a drummer wrote ecstatically of picking up an excellent midday meal one rainy day at the new hotel on the Barrytown docks. Although the roads were almost impassibly muddy, he was astonished at the jam of farmers and teamsters lined up to secure passage for their produce on the barges and trains. None of the wharves on the river, he declared, matched the hustle-bustle of Barrytown. In 1870 the United States census reported Barrytown's population as 350.

Changes at the Big Estates
In 1872 the grim reaper, always busy in those days, began flailing his scythe especially ferociously at the great estates. First Robert Donaldson died. His son William took over Edgewater. One of William's first contributions to Barrytown was to build the Roman Catholic Chapel of the Sacred Heart, for unbeknownst to his father, William's Catholic mother had raised the children in her faith. A mission of the mother church in Rhinecliff, the chapel also met the needs of Barrytown's immigrant Irish families who had recently suffered tragic losses when a boat in which they were traveling home from mass in Rhinecliff collapsed. Later he would donate ground for a consecrated cemetery and a parsonage. Following his father's bent for speculation, William would also subdivide and sell the land east of the church for new houses, cutting through a new street to accommodate them: Wildey Road.

John W. Aspinwall died in 1873. His wife Jane stayed on at Massena. (Descendants would live there until 1898.) Continuing her husband's dedication to the Episcopal church, Jane Aspinwall built the beautiful wooden St. John the Evangelist in his memory on her property north of Barrytown Corners. A free church operating outside the bishopric, it was and is governed by a self-perpetuating vestry on which women were permitted to serve, beginning with Jane. Every Sunday Mrs. Aspinwall would send a carryall through the hamlet to bring congregants to worship. Eventually, the roster numbered up to a hundred, with 70 children in the Sunday school, for she also recruited from the other estates. In that day called the Aspinwall church, it was strong enough to weather the divorce of its minister and Mrs. Aspinwall's daughter. It remains to this day an important place of worship.

Meanwhile death was behaving even more cruelly at Rokeby. Margaret Armstrong Astor died in 1872, William Backhouse Astor in 1875. They left Rokeby to their granddaughter Margaret Astor Ward, the only living child of their first-born Emily, who had died of childbirth at age 23. Having married John Winthrop Chanler in 1862 and given birth to 11 children in 12 years, Margaret died in 1875. The bereft father of the then 10 living children died two years later. The first plan of their many guardians — mostly middle aged and even older — was to farm them out to relatives; for instance, their aunt and uncle Laura and Franklin Delano, who lived south of Rokeby at Stein Valetje and had no children of their own, were slated to take two of the girls. (This may have been the inspiration for the Delanos adding significantly to their already imposing mansion in the late 1870s.) However, the orphans were vehement about staying together. They prevailed, making Rokeby, of which each owned a share, their home base.

Fortunately, their father's kind and patient maiden cousin presided over their upbringing and education, mitigating the dictates of their guardians, whose dicta they became expert in eluding. They were lucky too in Mary Meroney, the head nurse and ruler of the servants' hall. A proud Irishwoman with the tread of an empress, who had traveled through Europe in the employ of General and Mrs. Hamilton Fish, she both stimulated the children's innate sense of social superiority and provided them with a loving bosom to cry on. For over 35 years she would perform the vital function of binding the children together as a family. With their mother's Astor money and their father's smaller though not insignificant fortune, they were a high spirited, rambunctious, self-possessed, individualistic and sometimes self-destructive lot. But ultimately it was their pride to cling to each other.

Death would not leave them alone, however. The youngest boy, Egerton, died of a brain tumor in 1882 at age eight and his older brother Marion died of pneumonia while at boarding school the following year. He was only 15. The eight remaining orphans were devastated. Nevertheless, they were an astonishingly healthy and long-lived brood; even the youngest girl, Elizabeth, did not let a faulty hip ruin her life. And each of them, in distinctive, often eccentric ways, seems to have been happy. It helped, of course, that as they came of age they were given management of their own sizable fortunes.

Large Landowners, Farmers and Working People
All four great estates — Edgewater, Massena, Rokeby and Stein Valetje — were woven into the hamlet's daily life, not only because many Barrytowners found employment on them but because they all maintained sizeable farms and were as dependent on its shipping facilities, both by rail and by water, as were small farmers. The transportation network, key to Barrytown's well-being, was vastly increased when the rail line from Slate Dock in Rhinecliff to Hartford, Connecticut opened in 1875. The "Hucklebush," as the railroad was called because passengers were said to be able to gather the fruit as it ambled along, did not pass through Barrytown, but went through the village of Red Hook, then into Columbia County and through Boston Corners to Connecticut. Shipping between Barrytown and the railhead at Rhinecliff became common practice, as it was easier than the uphill journery to the station at Red Hook. When the rail system was extended to include lines running through southern Dutchess County and, in 1888, with the opening of the Poughkeepsie bridge across the river, it pushed the hamlet's horizons still farther.

Still, the mainstay employer for Barrytown residents remained the New York Central Railroad which now, through connections with other lines, spanned the country. In addition to freight handlers and conductors, the railroad hired large track crews. When a new corrugated iron depot was put up near the lower dock, and later when it was painted yellow with brown trim and roof, the entire hamlet was excited by the improvement. The second largest employer was the docks, for Barrytown remained an important stop for New York City- and Albany-bound passenger steamboats as well as barges. Increasing numbers worked independently as coopers, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, grocers, tailors, seamstresses, and farmers. Israel Snyder began with a small shop near the school from which he sold fish in season: "Fresh Fish with Their Eyes Wide Open," proclaimed his sign. Later he had a busy cooperage in the same location. There he prospered, making and repairing barrels, the prized container of the day because it did not need to be lifted, but could be rolled. In them were shipped the 60 varieties of apples grown in Red Hook as well as other commodities. Snyder also made tubs for butter and casks for cider. Another, smaller cooperage also flourished on the road passing Massena.

The Navins Brothers' blacksmith shop still stands at Barrytown Corners. Since horse teams were the only means of inland transport until trucks took over in the second third of the 20th century, business was good. When Peter Staley, a cigar maker, was elected Town Clerk he moved from the Village of Red Hook to Barrytown and wrapped cigars in the Navins' upper floors. He would become the hamlet postmaster as well. The icehouses, with their combined capacity of 82,000 tons, provided steady, if not well paid winter work, especially welcome to laid off dock workers. When another devastating fire — this time set by locomotive cinders — leveled the lower icehouse, as well as the hotel, store, and some houses, it was immediately built up again — a measure of the ice industry's importance to the community.

In the summertime, many Barrytown residents rented rooms to visitors escaping New York City. Nevertheless, as the turn of the century approached, Barrytown remained what it had always been, a bifurcated community, the large landowners on either side and the working people in the middle. To a remarkable extent, both were cut off from the main stream of national events, one by their wealth, the other by their focus on their work in a relatively isolated location. This configuration was beginning to change, however. It would do so in many, and often unexpected ways, in the 20th century.